Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 12/07/2025 5:49:21 AM PST by DFG
On Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, powerful antennas on the Mare Island shipyard picked up an urgent radio-telegram meant for U.S. Navy ships operating 3,600 miles away near Hawaii – “AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR – THIS IS NO DRILL.” That was the first stateside word about the devastating surprise attack by Japanese warplanes.
The strafing and bombing started just before 8 a.m. Hawaii time, or 10:30 a.m. PST on Mare Island under the time zone system used in 1941. The radio message went out immediately from Pearl Harbor, and was relayed to top Navy brass in San Francisco by senior telegrapher Van Dayton, on duty in Mare Island’s communications office.
Less than an hour later, at 11:20 a.m. PST or 2:20 p.m. EST, President Franklin Roosevelt’s press secretary, Stephen Early, on a telephone hookup to Associated Press, United Press and International News Service offices in the nation’s capital, made the information public.
A flood of national news about Pearl Harbor followed, starting with bulletins from the three news services. That included an all-caps flash filed at 2:22 p.m. EST by AP editor William Peacock, who repeated Early’s disparaging term in common use to describe the Japanese – “WHITE HOUSE SAYS JAPS ATTACK PEARL HARBOR.”
The radio-telegram was sent on orders from Lt. Cmdr. Logan Ramsey, operations officer for the Pacific Fleet Air Wing at Pearl Harbor, after he witnessed one of the first Japanese planes flying in low to drop a bomb. At first, he thought it was a U.S. plane being flown by a reckless pilot, but then he heard the explosion of a delayed-action bomb.
Ramsey’s first radio message was followed by a second one, in the same all-caps format, that stated, “WE ARE AT WAR WITH JAPAN – THIS IS NO DRILL.” Then a third message arrived, ordering Mare Island to immediately initiate a war plan that had been prepared in advance and locked in a safe in a shipyard office.
Mare Island historian Dennis Kelly says that caused problems – the staffer who had the safe’s combination was vacationing at Lake Tahoe. A few hours later, a California Highway Patrol trooper showed up at the door of the man’s Tahoe cabin with orders to return at once to Mare Island and open the safe.
The attack by Japanese planes and submarines at the ill-prepared Pearl Harbor base resulted in more than 3,500 U.S. casualties, including 2,403 killed. Twelve ships sank or were beached, and nine other vessels were damaged. More than 180 U.S. aircraft were destroyed, and more than 150 others were damaged.
The following day, in an address to a joint session of Congress, President Roosevelt called Dec. 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.” Congress then declared war on Japan, abandoning the nation’s isolationist policy and ushering the U.S. into World War II. Within days, Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, declared war on the United States, and the country began a rapid transition to a wartime economy.
The attack on Pearl Harbor galvanized the nation, resulting in an overnight refocusing of all U.S. military, economic, industrial, and scientific activity. Work on Mare Island ratcheted up to a level never seen before or since. The day after the attack, crews started pouring cement for bomb shelters on Mare Island.
Soon, the Mare Island-Vallejo area was “bristling with anti-aircraft batteries” and “a herd of barrage balloons was tethered above the island, their purpose being to discourage attack by low-flying planes,” author Arnold Lott wrote in “A Long Line of Ships,” his book detailing Mare Island’s history.
Civilian shipyard employment soared to about 44,000 during the war, with workers coming from almost every state. Sailors, Marines, and Army soldiers arrived by the thousands, and Vallejo’s pre-war population of about 30,000 tripled.
A third of the wartime population lived in hastily constructed housing projects scattered around the city – projects that were filled as soon as they were built. Some workers slept in cars, on porches, in hallways, bathrooms, abandoned shacks, barns, garages, or even on the docks. About 300 buses went out in a radius of 75 miles six times a day to pick up workers who lived outside Vallejo.
Mare Island was a key part of a San Francisco Bay area shipbuilding complex that was the largest in the world. During the war, Mare Island workers built 17 submarines, 31 destroyer escorts, 33 assorted small craft, and 301 landing craft, and repaired more than 1,200 damaged vessels – including several ships damaged in the Pearl Harbor attack.
One of the vessels repaired at Mare Island was the USS Indianapolis, which left in mid-July 1945 on the most secret mission of the war – delivering components of “Little Boy,” the world’s first operational atomic bomb. The components were unloaded at the island of Tinian on July 26, 1945. Four days later, the Indianapolis headed to Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, was torpedoed and sank. Of the 1,196 men aboard the big cruiser, about 900 made it into the water. After almost five days of shark attacks, starvation, thirst and exposure, 317 men were rescued.
On Aug. 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped “Little Boy” over Hiroshima. The explosion immediately killed about 80,000 people. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in an Aug. 15 radio address, and formal surrender documents were signed Sept. 2 aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
— Vallejo and other Solano County communities are treasure troves of early-day California history. My “Solano Chronicles” column highlights various aspects of that history. If you have local stories or photos to share, contact me on Facebook or at genoans@gmail.com.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
“ …. the staffer who had the safe’s combination was vacationing at Lake Tahoe”
Maybe not his fault, but one wonders how his military career worked out
How tragic that FDR knew it was coming but needed the attack to motivate the American people into accepting his position of entering the war. Americans at 88% did not want to go to war until FDR let Japan attack Pearl Harbor.
Knowing war was coming is not the same as knowing when and where.
“There’s nothing like a World War to bring you out of a deep economic depression.”
Post-coffee CORRECTION:
There’s nothing like WINNING a World War to HELP bring you out of a deep economic depression.
I spent part of 1976 on Mare Island, FT C school. Very interesting place.
I grew up in Vallejo. Both my parents were federal employees at Mare Island. My Dad was a nuclear inspector on nuclear fast attack submarines and my Mom was in personnel. I knew many Navy submarine sailors and government employees in our church. After my Mom retired, she was the head docent at the Mare Island Museum for many years. My Mom’s name is in the acknowledgements for the USS Indianapolis book by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic.
They intercepted the communication. This is why all of our Carriers were at sea and not at port. FDR was a POS!!
I have a framed Union Jack in my office. 22 X 34” size. It says, “Union Jack No. 9 MI 44” ( MI stands for Mare Island ) Proported to be off of the USS Missisippi.
The carriers put to sea in November for different reasons.
Very telling of our lack of readiness.
Quite the history to be proud of. My father was one of the firsts SeaBee (CB) sailors that built the airstrip on Guam, which helped to turn the tide of the war. It was essential to build long airstrips there so that long distance heavy bombers could bomb the crap out of the enemy. They did their jobs! There were still 5000 hostiles on the Island when my Dad set foot on it, and they were shot at on an hourly basis. Yet they finished the airstrip in a matter of days and had Americn troops landing there soon after.
BFL
LAKE TAHOE TO MARE ISLAND TRIP IN 1941 WOULD HAVE TAKEN AT LEAST 3 HOURS AT THE VERY BEST-—TRAVELING WITH ESCORT/ LIGHTS & SIRENS.
“There’s nothing like a World War to bring you out of a deep economic depression.”
Yep. It was the British and French war orders and purchases. Britain went broke buying stuff from us. Lend-Lease kept them in the war.
Britain went broke buying stuff from us. Lend-Lease kept them in the war.
And they lost so much manpower, after the war they had to import workers from the colonies, and that was all she wrote.
Very cool. That was a wonderful little city in the ‘70s. I haven’t been back.
The carriers put to sea in November for different reasons.
Correct.
The Important Information that had been communicated to DC in the run-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor was in an enormous "In Box" that had yet to be decrypted and processed.
I often think that the reason for the conspiracy theories about FDR and the attack on Pearl Harbor is an unwillingness to accept that this country could have been caught off guard to the extent that it was.
Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept is an absolute must-read on the subject of the attack; this should be considered a primer by anyone with even a cursory interest in the war.
He lays it all out (and at a time before the conspiracy theories took root, so he could hardly be considered an apologist for the FDR administration). The Japanese carriers, even those who did not participate in the attack, simply stopped any and all of their radio transmissions weeks before 12/07; US intelligence could not even hazard a guess as to where they might be, and the estimates were off by several orders of magnitude.
Also politics. Everyone knew war was coming, what was unknown was where and when. Kimmel and Short had warnings and should have had their submarines out on picket and aircraft in the air at dawn on patrol but they didn't.
Even as total as the surprise was at Pearl, the Japanese still took significant losses and would probably have been badly mauled if the US forces had been on alert.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.